By the way, yes—I almost sold Sammarco this summer when I realized we had too many midfielders, but I talked myself out of it. He’s a great player, a mainstay of the Italy team, he’s made 390 appearances for the club in all competitions, he loves it in Vercelli, and he’s still only 27. Why wouldn’t I want that guy on my team, even if he’s not quite as good as Paolo Martini?

I believe a real life manager would have his sanity checked if he were to try something like that – except he if has the best players for every position, which may be your case…

It’s seems the play rely on bringing the ball quickly in the attacking zone and then moving it between the many unmarked players. The opposite defenders actually look like outnumbered, confused dolls, not knowing where to look.

Would it work as well against a team playing a hard pressing, effectively slowing down your possession ? A midfielder or – even worse – a winger (that’s scary ! they got NOONE covering their back !) losing the ball under pressure might provide an easy counter opportunity to the opposition.

Well, the five-man attacking line really only comes into play when we’re playing against weak teams or going all-out for a goal. We have a few basic configurations of the tactic, so depending on the circumstances the wingers will either go all the way forward, hang back outside the area and support the midfielders, or focus on defending and play like advanced wingbacks.

Granted, we do spend a lot of time playing against weaker teams and going all-out for a goal, but at least the madness is relatively contained. We do get into some dangerous situations when the ball gets behind one of our wingers down the flank, but we typically have three world-class central defenders at the back and Martini/Sammarco providing a defensive screen in case one of them needs to close down a wide player. So more often than not we get out of it.

As for the advertising boards, i’m just glad to see that it’s still the “Serie A TIM” in 2021. Telecom Italia has surely thrived under a mandatory policy of prenatal sim card slot implants for every citizen.

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned before that I bought FM09 back in May after discovering this saga.

I had a terrible start at York City, moved a division down to Chelmsford City in the BSP and won the FA Trophy (the non-league FA Cup essentially) in my first full season, along with the play-off final. Our success mainly relied on over-the-top balls to our home-grown right winger, watching him consistently shred the opponent’s left back with one burst of pace and cross the ball for a striker to tap it in. Simple, but effective. Despite clubs two divisions above salivating

After we were one match away from league football and lost, I was demoralised. Then Peterborough United came calling, struggling in League 1. By the end of the season, our 4-4-1-1 formation was demolishing teams at times. If our experienced and skilful attacking midfielder, Fernando, had a song, I like to think it would have been to the melody of ABBA:

‘He’ll make your defence look shite
And score tonight
Fernando’

With two months to go until FM10, I had the desire to start anew with a short term project. Inspired by Pro Vercelli’s rise, I’ve decided to take control of San Marino Calcio, the microstate’s representatives in Serie C2/B. Contrary to their nickname, they’re not the Titani yet, but hopefully when I’m done they’ll be well on the way.

Paine — I’m not using real players, so it’s been all regens from the beginning (or at least real players disguised to look like regens). We’re still experimenting with the defenders’ mentalities. I thought about using an actual sweeper for a while, but decided against it because of the scarcity of good sweepers in the game. At the moment we seem to be getting the best results by either using a flat mentality or setting the central DC a couple of notches lower than his counterparts, which can help if teams are pushing strikers forward trying to disrupt our back line.

Chris — Good luck! You’ll have to do the San Marino challenge gvb mentioned here a few months ago: manage the club to a treble and the country to the World Cup. Sounds really challenging, but just within the realm of possibility…

I’m impressed that you’ve managed to do so well with a 3-4-3. I’m always terrified of using anything other than a back four, and I suspected you’d have trouble with the new setup.

Now if you just push one of your defenders forward, and get those wingers a bit further up the pitch, you can go full cirlce and make the 2-3-5 popular all over again. Hell, it’s probably the system that brought Pro Vercelli their original success.

I’m curious, as I’m playing through a longer period of time with a club for the first time in FM (i.e. long enough to see my first batch of 16 year-olds show up in the first team), what the development of a player like Paolo Martini looks like.

Do you customize his training schedule from a very young age? Does he go out on loan? If so, at what stage of his career? Does he jump from the U-18s to the full team, or progress through the reserves? Is his talent fully apparent from the age of 16? (I ask the last because it seems as those the talent of many of my brightest youngsters is never realized; a couple seasons ago I had four youngsters with six-star potential but now — though they’ve certainly improved their stats — I have none).

I think it’s just the natural order of things that a lot of promising young players won’t fulfill their potential—at any rate, I haven’t found a foolproof system for developing them. But I do have some general thoughts on what seems to work.

I’ve gotten really finicky about training, and I tend to put in an individual schedule right away for any player who looks like he might have potential. Figure out how you might want to use a player, see if there are any obvious weaknesses that can be corrected (i.e., a central defender with high jumping but terrible heading, or a winger with poor crossing, or a midfielder with great anticipation but terrible passing skills) and tweak the schedule accordingly. I re-evaluate these at the end of every season and make adjustments as needed.

But as far as I can tell, training doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with overall improvement; it just determines how the points are allocated when a player does improve. In other words, a kid who’s training twice as hard in aerobic as in tactics is more likely to see a point gain in pace than in decisions. But gaining the point itself isn’t a matter of training, only the distribution is. (I should note that this is only a theory, but one I’ve seen some fairly convincing evidence for.)

What determines overall improvement is, overwhelmingly, playing time, quality of league/opposition, and performance. So yes, in nine cases out of ten, your best bet is probably to send the player out on loan starting when he’s 18 or so, preferably to a playable league, and to the highest-reputation league in which he’ll be able to excel. The application of this rule is really imprecise—I’ve had players go off to unknown teams and average a 6.2 but gain 40 attribute points, while players who drop down to Serie B and average in the sevens barely improve at all—but it’s a decent rule of thumb. And past the age of 17 or 18, players almost never seem to get much better if they’re not getting first-team minutes.

With Martini, and with a select few other players (Riccardo Caprioli, Michele Proietti), I never sent him out on loan but gave him managed first-team minutes at Pro Vercelli in situations where I thought he would do well. I usually leave 16- and even 17-year-olds in the youth team while having them tutored by my stars, working on their personalities, etc. With a good 17- or 18-year-old, 200-300 minutes in the first team over the course of a season can give you a sense of what to expect.

When he was 18, Martini played in 19 competitve games for us, averaged a 7.05, and gained 53 attribute points. That’s obviously huge, and the next year, he was good enough to play in 42 games—he averaged a 7, and gained another 52 points. By that point, it was clear that he was not going to be an ordinary player—even an ordinarystar—and within the next 12 months he was a key member of the first team. That almost never happens, because Martini is a once-in-a-generation talent, but it gives you a sense of what to look for.

Thanks, Brian — that’s a fantastic explanation, more than I had hoped for. When the Scots when the 2022 World Cup with Simon Griffin bossing the midfield, Steve Moore an unmovable object in the center of defense, and Dougie Barr (great work on that, btw, FM-regen-name-generator) tearing up and down the left flank, I’ll make sure the Tartan Army knows who to thank.